


The Empress' Dilemma (The Meaning of a Name Remix)

by DesertVixen



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: F/M, Generally Canon Compliant, Vorbarra Children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:07:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26726398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertVixen/pseuds/DesertVixen
Summary: Laisa ponders children and names and politics.
Relationships: Gregor Vorbarra/Laisa Toscane Vorbarra
Comments: 6
Kudos: 35
Collections: Remix Revival 2020





	The Empress' Dilemma (The Meaning of a Name Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fawatson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fawatson/gifts).
  * Inspired by [What's in a Name?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/395238) by [fawatson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fawatson/pseuds/fawatson). 



She wondered if she would ever really, truly understand Barrayarans. Laisa had known that marrying Gregor meant changing her whole life. He had been very upfront about that, almost painfully so, despite the fact that she could see that he was afraid she would run away screaming. Laisa had listened, but she hadn’t really understood just how deep some of those changes would go. Maybe only someone who lived in the fishbowl could understand what it was like to breathe water instead of air. 

Gregor was not a typical Barrayaran, having grown up under the influence of Cordelia Vorkosigan, but in some ways he had less freedom than any of his subjects. Every decision he made had to be considered in terms of its impact. Every decision he made had to consider politics, on some level. Gregor could never make any decision – even falling in love with a Komarran subject of the Empire – without calculating how it impacted Emperor Gregor Vorbarra.

Of course, she had understood that their decisions on children were political – they couldn’t be anything else for the Emperor and Empress of Barrayar, no matter what Gregor and Laisa might want.

The number, order, gender, how they chose to conceive those children, how they chose to raise them, educate them, shape them – all of these decisions had to be viewed through a political lens. How would it play on Barrayar and throughout the Empire, especially Komarr?

Using uterine replicators and having gene cleaning performed was an absolute requirement for Laisa, and she’d found Gregor had felt the same way. She’d prepared an argument, even had some figures prepared just in case, but there had been no need. 

Gregor had confessed that he had concerns due to the historically small pool of suitable consort candidates. More, he’d confessed he had worries about himself, and he had told her about his father. The true story about his father, not the “appropriate for all audiences” story. Gregor had lives with the fear that Crown Prince Serg’s tendencies lived in his blood, and while they might not come to the surface in him, there was no way he would gift his sons or daughters that ticking time bomb if he could avoid it.

That, and the use of uterine replicators would let them have some space, to some extent. They would have one area where they could just be intimate, just be Gregor and Laisa, and shut out the rest of the world. Everything else in their world might be fair game, but using the replicators to create the next generation of Vorbarras meant there would be no reason for politics to intrude beyond the doors of their bedroom. Laisa had no real desire to experience an old-fashioned body birth, not when there were so many advantages to doing it the modern way. 

So they had made their decisions together.

Uterine replicators and all they entailed.

At least four children. Two sons – the heir and the spare – first, and two daughters to prevent furthering the sex imbalance that plagued Gregor’s own generation. Maybe more, later, but four to begin.

The question of names had not been so easy to come to an agreement on. Laisa had been vaguely aware of the Barrayaran traditions around names, but it hadn’t been important. It had been one of those facts she had learned to pass her history tests, along with an array of dates and people someone deemed educated people should know. But her first love had always been economics, and what made them work, and Barrayaran naming conventions had not been one of the things she needed to know. 

If anything, they had been an annoyance because the repetitive names were a pain in history class. There had, of course, been notable breaks in the pattern due to historical events – Yuri, for example, was not much used anymore. By the conventions, Gregor should have rightly been Ezar, but the choice had been made to name him for his maternal grandfather, for reasons that she was sure probably made sense to a Barrayaran. Laisa was rather pleased – a rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but it was difficult to imagine herself falling in love with a man named Ezar.

The problem, of course, was that the number of people who knew the truth of Serg’s madness was small enough to count on two hands. The Barrayarans who had been fed the myth of the noble Crown Prince Serg would question why his name didn’t live again in his grandson, a choice that Gregor was absolutely unwilling to live with.

But a name was not a simple choice for Gregor and Laisa to simply make based on what they liked – they had to name an emperor.

After stewing on the problem for some time, Laisa had asked Ekaterin if she and Miles had thought about not naming their first son for his grandfathers. Miles Vorkosigan seemed to alternate between slavish devotion to Barrayaran rules and tying the rules in knots when it suited him, but his relationship with his own father was not quite as…complicated… as it was for Gregor.

It had been a useful conversation in that it yielded a way for them to deviate from the convention and cloak it in respect to Laisa’s own traditions with the Naming Day, but it still hadn’t helped them solve the question of what to call their firstborn. 

She and Gregor had discussed it with several people, and everyone had eventually come to the same recommendation – Ezar. Miles had called it the only real choice, but Laisa disliked it. If she could not imagine falling in love with a man named Ezar – for her, it would always be associated with the old man in the history book – how could she imagine snuggling with a little baby Ezar? Her own paternal grandfather’s name, Thaddeus, was not much better. 

Finally, a discussion with Duv Galeni – Laisa admitted sometimes it helped to consult another Komarran who was used to political and personal dealings with Barrayarans – had yielded a suggestion that honored both Komarr and her family – giving the crown prince the second name of Tadeusz, in a nod to the Polish roots of the first Komarran settlers. 

Laisa could imagine snuggling a baby Tadeusz, or maybe even a Tad, and resigned herself to naming the next Crown Prince Ezar. Perhaps they had to give him the name, but no one said they had to use it when they were just Gregor and Laisa, not Emperor and Empress.

Maybe it would let him just be Tadeusz, not the Crown Prince.

She could hope.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoy this! I had fun getting into Laisa's head and seeing the problem through her eyes. I generally have a different opinion on the name, but I wanted to honor the reasoning and choices you had them make in the original story - but still give Laisa some input. The "Polish roots" is a nod to your story "Reception" which I have also really enjoyed.


End file.
